"We have to work the dark side, if you will, spend time in the shadows of the intelligence world."

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

CIA Operation Span: Spraying LSD on France

This one's a keeper.

In 1951, the southern French town of Pont-Saint-Esprit experienced what has been described as an episode of "mass insanity," which was blamed on an hallucinant "bread mold" by scientists from the locally-stationed Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company. Few believed this, but the story was forced to stick. For decades, the episode remained a mystery.

Until now. Now, it has been discovered that the localized hysteria in Pont-Saint-Esprit was not the result of mass simultaneous consumption of moldy bread, or any other toxic natural agent. It was the result of a toxic, entirely unnatural agent.

Actually, it was the CIA.

In the recently published book, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, H.P. Albarelli reveals documentary evidence that the mysterious incident was the result of the top secret covert CIA LSD experiment, Operation Span, conducted under the umbrella Project MK/NAOMI, cousin to the more notoriously infamous Project MK/ULTRA. The Pont-Saint-Esprit event resulted from a covert LSD aerosol experiment directed by the US Army’s top-secret Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, Maryland. When Sandoz Pharmaceutical scientists explained the bizarre affair with bread mold, the company had been selling LSD to the CIA and the US Army for "research."

the Pont-St.-Esprit outbreak in 1951 was the result of a covert LSD aerosol experiment directed by the US Army’s top-secret Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

...the scientists who produced the bogus cover-up explanations of contaminated bread and or mercury poisoning to deflect from the real source of the events worked for the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company, which was then secretly supplying both the US Army and CIA with LSD for research.

Now, and apparently secretly, the French government is expressing some dismay.

According to reliable US sources, the US State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research has been given a confidential inquiry from the office of Erard Corbin de Mangoux, head of the French intelligence agency DSGE (Directorate General for External Security). According to the report the inquiry regards a recently-published account of U.S. government complicity in a mysterious 1951 incident of mass insanity in France in the village of Pont-Saint-Esprit in southern France.

Favourite part:

When Shane asked a former top ranking Special Operations officer to speak about the division’s projects in general, Andrew M. Cowan, Jr. said, “I just don’t give interviews on that subject. It should still be classified—if nothing else, to keep information the division developed out of the hands of some nut.”

Yes, we wouldn't want "some nut" running around with aerosolized LSD, spraying it on people, now would we?